


On This Day In History

by telm_393



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, F/M, Family Feels, Gaslighting, Gen, Heart-to-Hearts, Heavy Angst, Hopeful Ending, Memory Issues, No Apocalypse (Umbrella Academy), Non-Graphic Rape/Non-Con, Panic Attacks, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Psychosis, Rape Aftermath, Sexual Abuse, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-08
Updated: 2019-04-08
Packaged: 2020-01-01 09:07:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 21,446
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18332960
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/telm_393/pseuds/telm_393
Summary: Five had a...special relationship with the Handler during his time at the Commission, or maybe he didn’t. After the apocalypse doesn’t happen, he tries to order his memories of the last few years while also actively suppressing them. It goes badly.His siblings are worried, and genuinely want to help. They are not unsuccessful.





	On This Day In History

**Author's Note:**

> Heed the tags, because all of them are there for a reason. This gets pretty heavy.
> 
> All of the abuse and non-con takes place pre-canon when Five is in his adult body, which is why there's no underage tag. There are mentions of the Handler creeping on young-bodied Five, but those are references to things that were literally in the episodes. 
> 
> Extra warnings: references to suicide, though no character is ever actively suicidal. Light murder and a fair amount of references to violence and murder, because assassins. Lots of references to drug addiction, because Klaus. Food issues. 
> 
> This fic is Luther friendly. 
> 
> Hope you enjoy!

Five is in a hotel room he doesn’t recognize, in a place he is almost sure he didn’t mean to go to and isn’t supposed to be.

He’s always on edge, but now his wariness is cutting him to the bone. He doesn’t know what’s happening, and it makes his skin itch and his hackles rise. When he looks around to try and get his bearings, the first thing he sees in focus is the Handler standing right across from him. She’s holding a briefcase. None of this clarifies anything.

He doesn’t know why she’s here, if she wants to give him an assignment, why she’d be giving him an assignment when he just got one two days ago and hasn’t completed it yet, why she wouldn’t just send it to him through pneumatic tube anyway. The Handler confuses him.

He suspects that he sees her more often than any of the other assassins do, and he finds that inexplicable. Then again, maybe he’s just being paranoid, maybe she does this with all the new recruits, but whether or not she treats him differently than her other foot soldiers doesn’t mitigate the fact that he does not know why she decided to flash in and out of the hotel room he was staying in in London, 1870, and take him to this new place instead. Five bites at the inside of his cheek. The pain feels real, but his mind is swimming, his head is pounding.  

He spots a newspaper on the ornate desk he’s standing next to. _The New York Times._ March 16, 1899.

“Where am I? Why am I here?” Five asks.

The Handler smiles, all smooth red lips and straight white teeth.

“I’m not done yet,” he tells her, and he’s annoyed now. She shouldn’t interrupt his work. She’s the one who gave it to him in the first place, isn’t she? This living world is full of questions, and Five is trying so hard to put the pieces together, and she is frustrating his efforts, and he hates it. He hates her.

The Handler takes off her hat, and then her gloves. She tucks a neat steel-gray curl behind her ear and then walks over to him until she’s standing too close. He steps back. She steps forward. She smells like vanilla perfume, and it makes his stomach turn. She’s still smiling. “I thought you could use a break,” she says, and there’s a purr in her voice that makes him think of a big cat.

It follows. There is something feline about her, like she could rip his throat out just for play, and he is at a loss.

“I don’t need a break,” he says, because he doesn’t. He never takes breaks, even when he’s not actively on the job, especially when he’s not actively on the job, when he’s figuring out how the briefcase works, how he can learn from it. When he’s writing his notes in Vanya’s book.

(He’s getting closer and closer. This was a lucky break, the Handler coming to him. The killing is somewhat regrettable, but it’s just shooting targets, in the end.)

Breaks are for people who are lazy, who like not thinking. Five is incapable of not thinking, not doing. When he’s working the buzzing, leaping, wandering parts of his mind are easier to handle, the unreal seeping into reality without fuss, and he doesn’t want breaks. Especially not with someone else there to distract him, someone not Delores, who doesn’t distract him anyway. She helps him, tells him that there’s a world he can save, that there’s work to do, that he has to double-check his equations…

Delores is back in London. Five’s heartbeat is too fast without her to share it with.

“Well,” the Handler says with a little shrug, _“I_ certainly need a break.”

Five almost asks why he should care about that, but he swallows his words. He’s never been wary of speaking before, not even back when there were people to speak to, but the Handler holds the keys to the rest of his life. He doesn’t want to be here in this room, but he wants to be back in the wasteland he came from even less.

So he is silent, and he looks at her, semi-hypnotized, and she looks back. There’s something dark and hungry in her eyes that he doesn’t understand, and it makes agitation prick at his skin.

Five can’t look away. He hasn’t seen other human beings in so long that their presence still doesn’t feel true, and the Handler is the first flesh and blood person he saw in decades. She’s still the only one who really speaks to him, who controls his future. She’s all he has.

When she kisses him, he’s too surprised to move, still as a statue. Or a mannequin.

He’s not sure if he’s going to tell Delores about this.

“Let’s move this to the bed,” the Handler whispers, and her smile has turned mischievous, like she’s sharing some secret with him.

He just stares, but he lets her push him back and back until he’s on the bed. “Take this off,” she says, tugging at his tie, and, still mostly unsure of what’s happening, he does.

The rest of his clothes follow, and her touch on his bare skin is electric. It hurts more than any true physical injury he can think of. He’s used to being injured.

He and Delores have never done anything like this, but it still feels wrong to scorn her in this way, and so Five begins to protest. The Handler’s mouth eats his words.

The orgasm feels more like being burned than anything else, and when he’s back in London he soaks a rag in water and scrubs until he can see plasma on his skin.

Delores asks him, “Where were you?”

He doesn’t answer, even though she needles him all night. He doesn’t want to say, “I don’t know.”

+

The next time he sees the Handler, it’s 1849 in Dresden and she flashes into his hotel room. He says, voice tight, “I’m not in the mood. I wasn’t then, either.”

She frowns, tilting her head with all the innocence of a snake. “Why, Number Five, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

He tenses with anger. “What you did,” he hisses. “At the hotel.”

“What hotel? This hotel?”

“The hotel,” he says, annoyed. He almost wishes he hadn’t brought it up. She must think he’s stupid. “You took me there, I never caught the name.”

“Why would I take you to some random hotel, Five?” the Handler asks, now with concern painted onto her face. She reaches out, trails her fingers down one of Five’s cheeks.

He wants to spit at her, but doesn’t move away. He’s starting to wonder if he’s just embarrassing himself. It seemed very real, in spite of the lack of context. “To...” he starts, and then he trails off. She’s looking into his eyes, and it’s almost hypnotic. “To sleep with me,” he says in a flat voice, and he’s not sure if he sounds like he believes himself.

Amusement spreads over her face, and she laughs, airy and cutting both. His face burns. “That was just a fantasy, dear!” Her smile thins, her eyes darken. “But I’m flattered.” She brightens again, and says, “Well, a little bird told me you have a new assignment. Interesting stuff, I must say. I thought you’d like it, so I was checking to see if you did.”

He likes very few things. Not being in the apocalypse, that’s one. Delores, another. Alcohol. Coffee, probably even more than alcohol.

He does not especially like killing. He says, “Oh, I’m having a great time.”

“Good, good,” she says, and he scratches at his wrist, wondering if she’s even here at all right now. Her coming and going, her light touch, her strange clothing, what she represents, she seems like a fantasy in herself. He wants to stab her to reassure himself that she’s not, but he doesn’t. She could still ruin him.

She giggles a little. “A hotel,” she says. “What, I just...up and took you to a little hotel?”

“It was big,” Five mutters, mortified. Another strike against his concept of reality, he supposes. He really thought she’d been with him. He can remember her hands on his body, her mouth on his, and he’s not sure if he’d be able to imagine something like that so vividly. He never has before. When he imagines things, they usually don’t touch him.

The Handler laughs again. “All right, then. Well, I am flattered that I was such an intense fantasy.” She leans in close. Her breath is on his face, and smells like cinnamon. “Maybe I’ll make it come true.”

“Please don’t,” he says. It’s meant to be wry. It comes out choked, like he’s afraid or something. He feels a surge of shame.

She smiles and tells him, “Don’t be embarrassed.” She moves in closer and closer. Her hand is on his shoulder, her lips are practically on his ear. He shudders involuntarily when she whispers, “I love men who play hard to get.”

He can feel himself, all of himself, stiffen a little, and he wants to scream.

She pulls back. “See you soon,” she says softly. “Have fun.”

She leaves in a flash of light.

When Five comes back to himself, the room is dark.

Two months later, in Santiago, 1962, he’s at his hotel, and then the Handler is there, and then he’s at _the_ hotel.

“No,” he whispers, and when she smiles he thinks she wants to eat him alive.

She says, “You know you want this.”

If he’s imagining her, imagining this whole place, he must want her, but he’s used to kissing Delores and getting himself off, and really the last thing he wants is the Handler. He doesn’t know why his mind would do this to him, but then, the mind does strange things sometimes. His mind does strange things sometimes.

“This is real,” Five whispers as she trails her fingers down his chest. He’s so hard it hurts. He is very sure that he doesn’t want this, but then, he fantasizes about things he doesn’t want all the time, can’t seem to help it.

“Of course it’s real,” the Handler says like she has no idea why he’d think anything different, and he lies back and tries to think of Santiago.

When it’s over and he’s seeing stars the way he might had he been punched in the face, there’s a flash, and he’s back in his real hotel room and the Handler’s gone and Five’s clothes are all bunched up in his lap. Disgusting.

He tells himself that he’ll confront her next time he sees her, but she has no idea what he’s talking about yet again, just laughs, yet again, and then they are back at the hotel, the fantasy place, the nightmare place, the place she won’t let him recognize, yet again, and so he lies back and thinks of Berlin, and next time he sees her he just doesn’t mention it.

(He lies back and thinks of Bordeaux.

He lies back and thinks of Southampton.

He lies back and thinks of Ayacucho.

He lies back and thinks of Leningrad.

He lies back and thinks of Granada.

He lies back and—)

+

Before Hazel leaves, Five leans in and whispers in his ear. “Terminate the Handler.”

Five’s voice is even. He says the words like he’s requesting a change in the radio station he’s listening to and not a woman’s death, like it’s just something to think about. In reality, he’s begging, and he thinks Hazel might know it. The man’s surprisingly empathetic for a brutal temporal assassin.

Hazel nods. “I’ll keep it in mind.”

Vanya killed Harold Jenkins. Vanya isn’t ordinary after all. Five decides to take Delores back to her home, but before he can his mind wanders past the apocalypse for the first time since he got stuck in it, and he is at the mansion when Vanya gets locked in the soundproof room. She’s let out in a matter of hours, and Five suspects that she may have been the cause of the apocalypse the first time—Jenkins the trigger, Vanya the bomb. He doesn’t mention it.

The bomb was defused, and that is that. He’ll keep an eye on Vanya, help her control her powers, but he can’t bring himself to kill her. He sacrificed everything to help save her.

Five and Delores do end up parting ways because it’s the right thing to do. Five’s mind drifts, his body does not. He stays in the mansion like his siblings. He has nowhere else to go.

All of that, within a span of four days. Things happen quickly now, in direct contrast with the way the years used to drag on and on, though the days are not as action-packed as they might have been. Almost anticlimactic.

On the second day—just before he goes to Vanya’s concert with the others, because she still wants to play and he certainly respects that, whether or not she’ll destroy the world after all (at least he’d die with everyone else this time)—he notices the piece of candy in his pocket. He can’t believe he forgot it. He unwraps it. A tracker blinks at him, and he feels a familiar surge of nausea deep in his stomach.

She’s good. She’s not good enough.

_Get her, Hazel,_ he thinks, and he crushes the tracker under his heel.

Maybe it’s on this day, Five will call it day two of his countdown _(to what?)_ , that Hazel kills the Handler. Or maybe it happened on day one, not so long after Hazel left, and that’s why the Commission never came looking for him. Hasn’t come looking for him yet.

Why she never came looking for him, at least.

In any case, Hazel’s last hurrah in his rebellion against the Commission must be more action-packed than Five’s, because on day four, Five gets a card.

There’s a gray and white kitten on it. Under the kitten, in pink letters, is written “GET WELL SOON!”

Nestled inside the card, there’s a polaroid. The Handler, a bullet in her head, one hundred percent deceased. Finally, Five can be sure.

This is what Five’s been counting down to.

_And if she comes back? If somehow she figures out where you are now, finds you? Time travel is such a tricky thing. Maybe you ought to start counting down to that too, whenever it happens._

Five is so relieved that it makes him giddy.

He doesn’t think about why.

He doesn’t really know why.

He wants to know why.

Five is able to push the very thought of the Handler away for a while as he does his best to dive into 2019, reminding himself of the fact that she was never important, always a means to an end. Five does what he can to settle into his new life.

His new life, where he’s not working for the Commission anymore, because in a race against time, he won, the world wasn’t destroyed and the Commission is now busy with a new future and Five has been let go. His new life with his brothers and sisters, who he risked everything for, though sometimes they seem like strangers.

Five buys new clothes, tries to drink a little less, helps Vanya work on controlling her powers, observes his siblings and the world around them, the world around him, the world where he’s not getting paid for anything, let alone to kill people, and he looks like a child still. It’s a second chance, though it feels more like being in a state of suspended animation, waiting for something to happen.

He loses days to his father’s notebooks, to mathematical formulae, to films his siblings insist on showing him, and he tries to keep himself busy as weeks and weeks stretch behind him and decades stretch out in front of him and he feels himself starting to stumble.

He has nightmares regardless of whether he’s asleep or not, and is maybe going stir-crazy in spite of the efforts of his siblings to get him out of the house, and the apocalypse is over but there’s something that’s _bothering_ him.

The thing is: there is a lack of specificity in some of Five’s more recent memories. His memories of his time at the Commission in particular. His memories of the Handler. There’s an old question that keeps coming to the forefront of his mind, a question of what happened and what didn’t that he’s been too busy to dwell on for the past few years, always focused on getting back to his family.

He’s not too busy to dwell on it anymore, though. If he can just pull together everything that happened in those years he was at work, it’ll—well, actually he’s not sure what it’ll do.  

He needs to clarify, he thinks when he wakes up one night from a dream about a hotel room ( _the_ hotel room) and the Handler.

(It made sense at the time, he wants it all to make sense now, put everything in its place—)

It’ll just be a little project, a timeline of events that has nothing to do with the Handler, really, just another moving piece in his game, a _fuck you_ to his years of confusion, a way to stop that distressing feeling of not knowing everything he can possibly know. A way to…fuck, who cares, it just feels like something he has to do, so he’ll do it.

A little project. Shouldn’t take more than a few days.

It’s probably a mistake to fall into that rabbit hole, but once he does, there’s no going back.

+

Five starts the timeline in 2059, in the ruins of a library, and then he goes from there until he's at—

**April 16, 1870**

**Great Northern Hotel, London**

**Graham Bell job**

—and that's where he pauses. It may or may not have happened just a couple of days after he got there. It was a six day long job, with a few hours added wherever else he'd gone, if he had gone somewhere else after all on—

**March 16, 1899**

**X**

—and what to put here? He doesn't know the hotel or the city or if any of what he's writing even happened _(remember?),_ he doesn't, so he just writes, under the absence of a space to complement the time—

**TH.**

And then he's back to London, April 16, April 17, April 18, the days all blurred together back then, decades and a few years ago.

(Her touch was so real he can still feel it on his skin, his face…)

Then—

**May 2, 1849**

**Hotel Taschenbergpalais Kempinski, Dresden**

**Neumarkt job**

—and here he pauses again, lingering over the space between Dresden and his next assignment in Athens, because it was the first time she popped in for a random visit after his first _fantasy._ It was in Dresden that she told him that what happened in 1899 didn’t happen after all.

Five doesn’t know how he should mark that visit, or the other visits like it, when the Handler would just appear in his hotel room to talk and tell him what was all in his head. He doesn’t know if he even should.

He does mark it, in the end, drawing a dot on the timeline roughly at the point when she decided to drop in. He doesn’t clarify what it means because he doesn’t need to and because he wouldn’t know how to anyway, especially with 1899 already making a mess of his project.

Five's hands aren't shaking. His body is. He keeps writing, memories of an uncertain reality slipping through his mind like blood trickling from a smooth stone. He catches what he can on his fingers and smears it on the wall.

(Funny story: back in the apocalypse, pre-Commission, pre-Handler, there were moments where, out of ink and too impatient to find a pen or pencil, he wrote in blood. He was only twenty years old the first time he tried it, and quite frankly it didn’t work too well. He thinks it was the romance of the thing that made him do it in the frantic heat of the moment, the refusal to run out of options. Delores was, predictably, horrified.)

There's a knock on his door. Five dots the "i" on Turin, still in what he is mostly sure is the first five months of his time at the Commission. He takes a deep breath, separates himself from the work like cutting a thread. "What?" he asks.

"Dinner," Luther calls through the door. "Diego made…pierogis? And he's really proud of them, and I think he might stab you if you don't come down, so. Fair warning."

"I could take him," Five responds, because he could, but he steps away from his wall anyway, sets his marker on his desk, and blinks over to the dining room. He sits, smirking when Klaus jumps about a mile at seeing him. Small pleasures.

"Fuck! Scare me to death, will ya?" Klaus complains, hand placed delicately over his heart. Five wondered, a short time back, if maybe Klaus would dial his constant drama down a bit when got sober. He did not.

"I'm sure Ben would be willing to teach you how to be a productive citizen of the afterlife," Five says, and Vanya snorts.

Klaus glances over his shoulder and then gasps, affronted. "Well, excuse you!"

From what Five can tell, Klaus and Ben bicker a lot. It makes Five miss Delores a bit, but just like he is better off with his family, or so she said, she is better off with her friends.

“It’s fine, mom, I can carry it,” Diego reassures as he walks into the dining room and makes his way to the table to set down a platter that contains what Five thinks is an exaggerated amount of pierogis.

The food looks fine, almost good enough to overwrite Five’s hesitation to eat anything Diego’s made after that sad attempt at cornbread the other day. Diego asks mom to stick around and have dinner with them as if he’s forgetting that she doesn’t need to eat, but she declines.

She says she has to go shopping, and not even Diego pushes her to stay.  She seems to actually take joy in going out now that she can. Five sees her leave the room out of the corner of his eye, and the swish of her skirts makes his breath catch in his throat. He closes his eyes tightly for two beats and then opens them and moves on, noting that at some point he did manage to get a pierogi onto his plate. He pokes at it. He’s not hungry. He takes a bite anyway.

It’s not bad. None of this is bad, he thinks as his gaze catches on the surface of the table.

He and the others watched _The Wizard of Oz_ when they were little, snatches of it during their half hour of free time and then they’d sneak out of their rooms and watch it again with the volume at two. Five likes going to the cinema. He obviously never did as a child, and he hasn’t since he got back to 2019, but he certainly remembers doing so while working for the Commission, going to theaters when he could find the time.

He likes the dark and the feeling of being around other humans without having to talk to or even really acknowledge them, extras in the background, likes taking a backseat to someone else’s story. In 1939, he went to see _The Wizard of Oz,_ and he surprised himself very much by crying. Not important.

The tablecloth is checkered blue and white and it looks like Dorothy’s dress. He appreciates that, it’s much friendlier than…

(The elegant eggshell white tablecloth between them, the candles. The candles were a fire hazard, he noted with little interest, but no one gave a damn about fire hazards in those days. Her smile and the waiter’s rictus grin. She ordered his food and he told her it was delicious. It was, in fact, delicious, good food, good wine, he drank as much as he could to deal with the bad conversation. Three times, she took him down to the dining room three times and he never figured out why. She reached across the table and…)

Five starts when he feels something touch his shoulder, turning with jerky movements to look at Klaus, who has his hands up and an amused glint in his eye. “You totally spaced out,” he says, and Five rolls his eyes in response and then goes back to his meal, cutting his pierogi into smaller pieces so that he won’t have to deal with the others looking at him with amusement or, worse, concern.

Five takes a bite, chews, and swallows. He tells Diego, “This is better than the cornbread.”

+

The dining room is bustling, and there is an overpowering scent of flowers, what kind exactly Five couldn’t say. All around him he hears excited chatter, airy, affected laughter, and at least three different languages. He doesn’t eavesdrop, all of his attention on trying to keep good posture. He does look for a window, to see what’s going on outside, to find, perhaps, some clue as to where he is, but he can’t pinpoint any windows here.   

There’s a chandelier hanging above him. The hotel is, for the time period, really quite nice. Idly, he trails his fingers along the edge of the tablecloth, and looks up to see the Handler across from him. She’s reading a newspaper. It’s covering her whole face, and it looks like the only front page news is that the paper is _The New York Times_ and it’s the sixteenth of March, 1899.

The Handler lowers the paper so that her whole face is visible, and she smiles. She smiles and smiles until her mouth splits open to reveal a gaping maw lined with rows of sharp teeth, like a leech wearing lipstick.

Five wakes up with a jolt, cold sweat on his forehead and his heart blocking his airway, and he scrambles to his feet, nearly tripping over his own bedcovers as he searches blindly for something to write with. His fingers close around a thin purple erase board marker and then he jumps from his bed and stumbles to the edge of the room where he began his timeline.

_The New York Times._ The first thing he saw when he got to the room, every time, it was the fucking _New York Times,_ that’s how he knew the date, ( _you idiot)._

Next to each **X** he has thus far (six of them, it turns out that it’s harder to parse his experiences than he thought it would be and there is a not insignificant part of himself that is frustrated with the jumbles of dates and places in his mind, the way that putting them one after the other when it’s not like they were one after the other as such is so damned difficult, Dad always said that time travel could contaminate the mind) _,_ he writes **NYC.**

New York City, right next door. If Five warped his way through the whole city, he wonders if he’d recognize the hotel, wonders exactly where it was. Almost certainly Manhattan, all things considered.

Five banishes the idea of a walkthrough of the entirety of Manhattan. He won’t find anything, or he won’t find anything yet. He needs to do more research.

He could look it up in the library, historic hotels of New York City, perhaps they have a photograph or two of the rooms (or of a dining room) _._ He thinks he’ll write on the walls instead.

**X, NYC.**

He’s getting closer.

The Handler’s face eaten up by sharp, bloodsucking teeth jumps to his mind, and Five shakes his head hard and tells himself, “Boston, the next assignment was in Boston…”

It was in Boston, and then he didn’t see her for a while. Days, weeks, never over a month without some sort of visit from her, or so his internal calendar tells him, but his internal calendar, his internal timeline, he’s starting to think it’s nothing special.

He considers going back to sleep, but there’s nothing to be gained from that but unsettling dreams, and he has work to do.

For a moment he’s worried that he’s getting things mixed up, but then he tells himself, “You can do it again until it’s right.”

On the wall, he writes **Boston**.

+

“Five?” someone says, and he starts, swinging around to face Diego, who puts his hands up in surrender. “Didn’t mean to scare you, man.” 

Five bristles. “You didn’t _scare_ me.” Five doesn’t feel fear, it’s one of his best qualities. “Have you never heard of knocking?”

“You’re one to talk,” Diego says, and then he explains. “I did knock. You just didn’t open the door.”

“So you didn’t consider the distant possibility that I didn’t want to?” Five asks.

“It’s been like two days since any of us have seen you,” Diego points out, and Five pauses. He blinks. His eyes are blurry.

Two days isn’t a long time in the grand scheme of things, but it does seem like a pretty extended amount of time to have not left his room at all. “You’re exaggerating,” Five accuses, and he turns back to the wall and begins to write.

(He’s nearly done, as far as he can tell, on Dallas already.)

Five’s marker won’t write. It’s run out of ink. He frowns, and then pushes away from the wall a bit to look around.

The marker falls from his hand and to the floor with a sad clicking sound, joining three other used up markers, including the purple one he was using what was quite possibly two days ago. Can’t be right, that’s so much time to lose, even with his fantasies he only lost a couple of hours at most. He throws a look over his shoulder at his timeline, and the memories of writing it start blurring once he gets to the point where purple marker turns to pink Sharpie.

Disoriented, he scratches at his arm where his tracker scar is, and sways on his feet when he turns away from the wall.

Diego takes a step forward, as if he’s afraid Five will fall. Five takes a step back in response, back hitting the wall, and he narrows his bleary eyes. “Two days?”

“Something like that,” Diego says, starting to look freaked out. “Sorry to break the news. Wait, did you not sleep?”

Five rolls his eyes. One good thing about his younger body: he doesn’t need nearly as much sleep, which means he can avoid unpleasant dreams. Also, his back and knees don’t hurt anymore, which is a plus, and his skin was running out of space for scars anyway, and the Handler never touched this body and this body never touched her…

And then he thinks, _wait._ That’s not accurate. Almost no time at all in this body compared to his other one, and still she got her hands on him, didn’t she? That day he spent in management, she wouldn’t stop touching him and he wouldn’t stop letting her, mind going blank and body going limp _(play dead, maybe she’ll lose interest)_ as she pushed and she pushed.

Five thinks of the way that she trailed her fingers along his face (just like she used to),her purposeful flouting of the conventions of personal space, how she kept talking about his new body. She was having a new body made for him. He wonders if she had a part in it, if she drew up some kind of blueprint, and he was never really planning to take it, he knew he wouldn’t have the time, but the thought makes him feel ill. She had the power to make him a new body. What would she have done with that?

There is no body of Five’s that the Handler hasn’t touched, and Five pushes his fingers against his hair. There’s so much of it, and it all feels greasy, just like the rest of his body. Disgusting.

Five shakes his head and stumbles over to his closet, blindly digging out some underwear and slacks and a flannel shirt that looks like something Vanya would wear.

“Five?” Diego’s asking behind him, sounding a little more alarmed than necessary, considering that all Five is doing is rooting through his wardrobe. Maybe Diego shouldn’t have interrupted him. If he hadn’t been interrupted, none of this would ever have happened, and Five could’ve finished writing his timeline and started revising it and just done that forever.

Five pulls away from the closet with his clothes in his arms and says, “I’m taking a shower.”

He blinks to the bathroom and strips with an urgency that doesn’t seem warranted, or that’s what a rational part of his brain tells him. Another, bigger part of his brain tells him that actually he’s covered in grease and hasn’t showered in maybe days. His skin itches, and he turns the shower on and steps in.

_Remember the marathon showers you’d take after those fantasies? What a waste of water, what a waste of time, she thought you were special but sometimes I think you’re just a waste of space…_

The water sprays down on him so hard that he sputters, any thoughts he might’ve had washed away by the pressure.

It’s probably more water pressure than any one person needs. Five feels like he’s being pelted with gravel. It takes a moment for him to realize that the water is probably too fucking hot for him, and he turns down the heat until it’s just too hot, but not intolerably so. He stands in the middle of the shower and he doesn’t know when or why he started hyperventilating, but here he is, coughing out the water that he’s inhaling and practically pouring antibacterial soap on himself. This isn’t his finest moment, he thinks while he scratches at his cheek as if pushing soap into the raw skin will somehow make him feel better.

(“You know you wash like a rape victim,” Delores says, and Five, just out of the shower in Belize, 1988, goggles at her. He doesn’t even know if he heard correctly; he does have a headache, the telltale time travel one even though he hasn’t traveled at all today. She looks back at him thoughtfully from her place on the armchair across from the bed.

_“What?”_

“You know what I mean,” she tells him, and Five shakes his head.

“I absolutely do not.”

“You just came back and showered until the water was cold, and then you kept showering. I think you took off skin.”

“What the hell does that have to do with rape?” Five asks, and saying the word almost makes him gag, which is ridiculous for someone who very recently split a man’s skull in two with the butt of a rifle and may or may not have swallowed some brain matter. “I just had a fantasy, is all,” he mutters. “I must’ve been getting off.”

“That’s an odd thing to not be sure about,” Delores says.

Five shakes his head. “They’re strange fantasies.”

“About the Handler?”

Five feels even sicker. “How did you know?” he asks in a whisper, and Delores rolls her eyes.

“Five, just because you put me in the _closet_ when she comes over doesn’t mean I can’t _hear._ ”

Five feels guilt slither up his throat and he says, “I’m sorry, I know I shouldn’t be keeping this from you…”

“You can’t help it, darling,” Delores says gently. “It’s fine.”

Five puts his fingers against his pulse point, the exact place that he swears the Handler kissed not long ago, his heartbeat rapid under her lips, and he wishes he’d stayed in the shower longer. He wishes this was a feeling he could wash off.)

There’s shampoo lying in the middle of the shower _(is this even your bathroom?)_ and he grabs it and squeezes a glob of it onto his hand.

The scent of vanilla is overpowering.

(She smells like vanilla, it’s like she’s fucking bathing in vanilla, she smells so strongly of it he can taste it.)

Five doubles over and throws up. He hasn’t eaten in a while, so it’s not as disgusting as it could’ve been. Small mercies.

Five drops the shampoo. A white glob of liquid starts slowly leaking out of the bottle, getting wiped out by the water as quickly as it comes.

The water is cold now. Five turns it off and steps out of the shower. He feels ill, and the world around him is swirling dangerously, but at least he’s breathing again, for a given value of breathing. He grabs a pink, fluffy towel and scrubs at his skin with a new burst of energy. He feels outside of himself, as though someone who’s very much not Number Five is trying to take his own skin off with a hot pink towel, some thirteen year old child with a few screws loose…

_Why did you let her touch you?_

Five takes in a shallow breath as he changes into his clothes. In retrospect, he should probably just have grabbed some pajamas, because he’s fifty-eight years old and that is old enough to know that no matter how young this body is, it still does need to sleep.

Five manages to take a deep breath, swallow bile, and leave his old clothes and the towel crumpled on the floor.

The faint smell of vanilla still makes him feel ill.

He opens the door and steps out into the hallway, where he confirms his suspicion that that wasn’t his bathroom. Allison stands in front of him, her hand extended as if she’s been knocking on the door. So that was where the rhythmic pounding sound in Five’s head was coming from.

She’s looking down at him like she wants to ask a lot of questions. Five doesn’t make a snide remark about how he’s glad she lost her voice, but it’s a near thing.

“I threw up in your shower,” he informs her. “Also, your shampoo is vanilla-scented and you’re better than that, so I poured it out. You’re welcome.”

Allison gives him the most baffled, affronted look he’s ever seen, and he’s seen people ask him why he’s murdering them. He shrugs, walks past her, and walks right into Luther.

“What the hell, Five?” he asks, and Five rolls his eyes. He doesn’t want to talk, he thinks that that should be obvious.

“I need some sleep,” Five says, because sometimes there’s nothing to say but the truth, and he blinks to his room.

When he looks around he’s glad to note that he did, in fact, manage to get to his actual room, and he curls up on top of his bed and loses consciousness more than goes to sleep, faintly hoping that he’s tired enough to pass on dreaming this time.

(“This is what happens,” she says, false sympathy stark in her voice, “when you let it all build up.”)

+

Five wakes up in the hotel room, and his heart seizes. He scrambles out of the bed, silk sheets pooling on the floor. He’s in gray slacks and shirtsleeves, the jacket of his suit thrown over that armchair he’s so familiar with.

The Handler is nowhere to be seen, and Five stumbles over to the window, debating just jumping out and being done with it. He reels back when he opens the lace curtains and sees that there’s nothing out there but a pure white expanse.

He hears laughter echo throughout the room, bouncing off of the walls, and slowly he turns to look at the Handler. He doesn’t know when she got there, but she’s standing at the foot of the bed, smiling. She’s wearing a white dress, white gloves, white high heels, and a veil, so sheer he almost can’t tell that it’s white too.

“I knew you couldn’t resist me,” she chirps, smile still firmly affixed to her face.

“Leave me alone,” he says. “You know I don’t want to do this, I never do.” There isn’t much heat in his voice. He says this every time, and it happens every time anyway.

“You just want to go home, poor thing,” the Handler says, her red lips stark against all that white as they morph into a pout. “But I don’t know that! I think you’re accepting your fate, don’t I?”

Five feels as though he is watching a movie made up of three different movies cut together, but he manages to say, “You never did really know me.”

“I knew you in plenty of ways, Number Five.”

“I tricked you,” he tells her, for once moving towards her and not away, until they’re standing right in front of each other. “I did.”

The Handler bares her teeth, her lips stretching up and up into a bloody Glasgow Grin. “Wanna fool me again? Distract me again? Do you have another choice, Number Five, did you ever have another choice with me?”

“Of course I did,” Five says. “That was the point.”

He doesn’t want to do it, but his hands move of their own accord, and he lifts up her veil. There’s blood running down her face and her eyes are bright with amusement, like she knows something he doesn’t.

He kisses her.

Five wakes up with a start, his heart beating rapidly and his head swimming as he mutters, “Just a dream, just a dream, dreams don’t mean anything, dreams don’t mean anything…”

“Five?” Luther asks, and Five yelps, his hand twitching towards the first drawer of his nightstand where he keeps his ammo and unloaded handgun. He clenches his fist to keep himself from opening it.

“What are you doing in here?” he spits out at Luther and Allison, who are both in his room, how nice.

Allison puts her hands up in a gesture of surrender, and Luther says, “We were just making sure you were okay.”

Five rolls his eyes. “Of course I am.”

“You were talking in your sleep.”

Five feels a flicker of discomfort as he remembers the dream with more ease than he’d like. “What did I say?”

“Uh…we couldn’t really understand. You just sounded like you were having a bad dream, but then you woke up, so.” Luther gives him an awkward shrug.

“Fascinating,” Five offers. “Now leave.”

Instead of leaving, they notice the timeline. Luther moves over to peer at it—since his views on privacy apparently haven’t changed since he was four years old and walking into Five’s room without knocking to tell him fun facts about space—and Allison follows.

“Will you two get away from that?” Five snaps, rising to his knees on his bed. He would stand up, but he thinks he’d fall. He’s starting to wonder if there’s a point to sleeping at all. “And get out.”

There’s something in his voice that makes Luther and Allison exchange a look and head for the open door. Five is almost relieved, but then Luther pauses and turns around, and Five swears under his breath.

“What happened on March sixteenth?” Luther asks, and fury rises under Five’s skin like a fever.

“None of your business,” he snaps.

Luther frowns and crosses his arms, and then he says, “You’re our brother.”

Five’s skin itches. He feels like there’s cotton in his mouth, and makes sure to enunciate through it. “That means absolutely nothing. I’m only here because I can’t get a real place to live, not to play house with all of you.”

“We’re worried!” Luther says in protest even as Allison knocks her shoulder against his and gives him a look that Five very much hopes means “back off”.

“So stop!” Five replies. “Stop worrying, stop caring. Act like Dad, you’re good at that, aren’t you?”

Allison puts a protective hand on Luther’s arm and gives Five a furious look as Luther flinches, hurt. _Asshole_ , she mouths.

Luther wilts, and Five thinks that in some other situation, if he weren’t so preoccupied with things far more important than the delicate feelings of his siblings, he’d feel bad. Instead he smiles, triumphant, though the smile fades as Luther soldiers on.

“We’re just worried,” Luther mutters. “You’ve been acting weirder. I mean, you went totally AWOL and then you used Allison’s shower like that, which was…yeah.”

_It’s only been a few days,_ Five wants to point out, but something about the thought makes his voice fail.

Has it really only been a few days? Of course. It’s been less than a week. He told himself it’d only take a few days to do this and it did, but it’s not over yet, can’t be. He doesn’t feel any different. He still doesn’t know enough about when he became this person. The kind of person who could kill his way through a timeline of events from one side of his childhood room to the other, stopping just short of the wall behind his bed. The timeline ends in November 1963.

He barely remembers writing any of it, and yet it still flashes in his mind’s eye. He doesn’t even need to look at it to see the mark he made to note that the Handler visited his hotel room in Dallas, so soon before he left.

_You marked it like it was just another visit, like you can play dumb about Dallas…_

There’s a smack of skin against skin, once, twice, and Five catapults back to reality. His shirt is sticking to his back with cold sweat. Allison claps her hands together again, and Five twitches away a little.

Humiliation darkens his mood and he says, “Fuck off. I don’t want you here, so get out!” He doesn’t mean to raise his voice, but he does. His voice cracks, and he didn’t mean for that to happen either. “You owe me,” he snarls, scrabbling to find anything to say as the anger in him boils over. “You owe me some privacy. I gave so much of myself to get back to you _idiots_ , and you…”

Five’s voice is loud and ragged to his own ears, and it dies. He’s come too close to saying too much, and now he feels nothing at all. He shakes his head and whispers, “Get the fuck out.”

There’s wariness in Luther and Allison’s eyes, now, and maybe some pity, and before Five can do anything about that, they finally acquiesce. “This isn’t over,” Luther says, but he leaves, and Five’s won. Allison follows, though not before shooting Five another glare and mouthing, _Seriously._

Five scoffs and shakes his head again, turning away and taking some small measure of relief in the fact that they shut the door behind them. Five sits back on his heels and puts his head in his hands.

+

This is what happens in Dallas:

Five is close. To saving the world, saving his family. Sometimes he wakes up, rolls over in bed, and checks and re-checks his equations just to reassure himself that he didn’t dream it, that he really is almost there. He’s been planning it for years, he’s always been trying to get home, and he’s ready to leave, he needs to leave now, just the other week he had one of those fantasies again and...well.

It doesn’t matter, none of it matters, because he knows when he’s going to go home and he knows how he’s going to do it, and once he stops the apocalypse, the fantasies will stop too.

He doesn’t know who will kill Kennedy, and he doesn’t give a damn. He’s never really cared about this job, he’s only ever cared about being good at it.

There’s a flash of blue, and the Handler is in his hotel room. He’s not taken aback; her sudden appearances are normal by now. She’s just checking in on him, just here to chat with her favorite employee. She’s not going to take him to the hotel, because she did that last week and doing it twice in a row wouldn’t fit the pattern of reality, fantasy, reality, fantasy. Of course, that could very well just be his mind making patterns where none should be, because he hasn’t mentioned those fantasies to her in years, so how could she plan her visits around them?

Those fantasies, still the same every time. Five gets flashed over to a lamplit room with lace curtains, and the Handler is there, and she wants him, and she takes what she wants, and then it’s over. The three times they went to the dining room to eat are outliers that he doesn’t try to parse. He doesn’t try to parse any of it anymore.

He dismisses it because she dismissed it so easily years ago, but now she’s standing in front of him and he finds that something has changed. He didn’t notice it until now, and maybe it didn’t happen until now, but it’s like a candle inside of him has been re-lit. It’s all so close to being over, and Five is so tired of pretending to believe her lies, and he asks, “What’s it called?”

The Handler raises her eyebrows in a look of genuine surprise, and there’s a muted part of Five that delights in that, in surprising her, in making her feel anything at all. He hopes it makes her angry when she realizes he’s left her behind. He stands up and moves towards her, just a step, but not a hesitant one.

“What’s what called, Number Five?” she asks, and he smiles.

“The hotel,” he says with no hesitation. “The hotel you take me to. During the other visits.”

The Handler smooths the genuine surprise from her face, replacing it with feigned bafflement, and Five feels a familiar pang of doubt. It’s been a long time since he mentioned the hotel. Maybe she...

“Oh, I’d almost forgotten about those fantasies. Don’t tell me you’re still having them? How sweet!”

Five’s entire body burns and itches, and he snaps, “Just tell me what it’s called. It’s not like I mind going, I just want to know where you take me. It’s dark enough that I can’t see out the window, and the dining room...that wasn’t much help to me either.” _I know you did that on purpose, I don’t care._

Most of what he says there is true, so of course the Handler focuses on the part that isn’t. “You don’t mind going?” she asks, sounding pleased. “Of course, I know as much about where you think you’re going as you do, but it’s nice to know you don’t mind it anymore.” She takes a couple of steps closer to Five, and he doesn’t step back, nailed to the floor. He can feel her breath on his face. “I always did hate the idea that you thought I was forcing you.”

She smells like vanilla, just like she always does. She puts her hand on the side of his face, and he just stares. He has a hard time not just staring at her, studying her, memorizing her face to see if there’s anything different about it this time.

The thing about the Handler, with her tailored dresses and painted face and perfect smile, is that she’s never quite seemed real to him. Five certainly didn’t think she was real when he first saw her, clean and remarkably unbroken as she stood in the midst of chaos, and after all this time she still feels like something beyond understanding.

But her form is so familiar against his.

He has been here before, powerless, backed into a corner. He’s not powerless now, he refuses to be, he’s always been stronger than her (but he never pushed her away, never teleported out into the unfamiliar evening). “Just tell me,” he says. He sounds tired, but not afraid, not unsure. He’s learned how to keep weakness out of his voice.

She shrugs and lightly replies, “Sorry, can’t.”

He wants to turn away from her, then, tell her to leave him alone and be done with her. He doesn’t.

(He makes a choice to let her do whatever she wants, because otherwise he doesn’t get a choice at all.)

He tells her, “You only think you have the upper hand.”

Her smile drops into puzzled amusement. “You’re feisty today,” she says. “I mean, I like it, but...what brought this on?” She grins, excitement in her smile. “Finally admitting that you want more than just fantasies?”

“I think I am,” he says, not considering how that may sound in the context of the conversation she thinks they’re having until she kisses him.

Five grabs her arms to push her off of him, but instead he pulls her closer, the horrible familiarity of the situation making him go through motions he’s never supposed to have gone through just to get it over with.

(This is real.

_Of course it’s real.)_

He’s on the bed now, her hands undoing the clasp on his trousers, and Five tells himself that he’s not wrong, he has the upper hand, he always has, she thought he was hers and he’s not, he’s always been using her, and this—this is good. It’ll make it all the more bitter when she realizes that he’s been playing her.

When they’re done, it’s different than it usually is.

At the hotel the Handler always flashes Five right back to the place she took him from once they finish. That’s not an option this time, and so they just lie together for a few minutes until she sits up, leans over him, and kisses him slowly. He kisses back, because if he doesn’t it’ll seem suspicious, and when she pulls back she looks so pleased that he wants to gag.

(If he hadn’t asked about the hotel, would this have happened? _Why did you have to ask? Why did you care? It doesn’t matter anymore, it wasn’t going to matter anymore..._ )

The Handler stands, the sheets rolling off of her body, and Five stares at her, near-hypnotized yet again. He’s never seen her naked like this before. Naked, yes, of course he’s seen her naked, at this moment that’s impossible to deny, but he’s never seen her naked _like this,_ apart from him, reaching for her clothing, pulling her slip over her head, looking for all the world like a human being.

Five hates her so much it takes his breath away.

He watches in silence as she finishes dressing, her movements slow and luxurious, and is only able to catch his breath once she picks up her briefcase and he realizes that she still hasn’t answered his question. “What’s the hotel called?” he asks.

The Handler smiles at him, and now she looks like the cat that got the canary.

She says, “I wouldn’t know.”

And then she’s gone, leaving Five to stare into empty space and think that maybe she was telling the truth after all.

(Maybe all of this was for nothing.)

Mechanically, Five changes into another suit. He sits on the unmade bed and thinks, _I didn’t want that to happen._

But he knows for a fact that it did.

+

Five stares at the last few points on his timeline.

**November 20, 1963**

**Magnolia Hotel, Dallas**

**JFK/home**

Then, somewhere around the 21st, a circular mark for the Handler’s visit, the last time he saw her in his old body, the last time he touched her. _But not the last time you let her touch you, you let her touch you, you let her…_

Seeing the mark, which he drew smaller than the others, as though it’d make a difference as to what happened on that day, makes him feel like something inside him is shaking. Like his bones are rattling from a constant aftershock, though the memory of the earthquake is foggy.

**March 24, 2019**

**The Academy, Westford**

**Apocalypse job**

The present.

**March 31, 2019**

**General Westchester area**

**Apocalypse averted**

No hotel anymore. He thinks he’d be fine never staying in a hotel ever again.

That’s all. It’s over, that’s where the story ends and the new one begins, and there’s no timeline for that yet.

_But there are four days left before it’s really, really over. You know that. You know everything, you know everything, you know everything…_

“I know everything, I know, I know,” Five repeats to himself under his breath, the lies bitter in his mouth. He takes a silver marker and draws the rest of the timeline, ending it with a bold line tied off with a long vertical mark. Below it, he writes:

**April 4, 2019**

**TH**

**The end**

The day Five got Hazel’s card, the one that’s still in his drawer next to his Glock 19. There, the end, _are you happy now?_

Not really, no, but Five can’t remember the last time he was happy.

That’s not true. Of course he remembers, Five remembers nothing of import but he does remember the trivial things, if he digs. He was happy when Delores decided to start talking to him. When they would have long conversations into the night.

He was happy when they kissed. He was happy when he took a shower for the first time in a painfully long time, there at Commission Headquarters, and found that he didn’t itch so much anymore. He was happy when he went to the movies during the lulls between jobs.

He was happy when the apocalypse turned out to be over. He was happy not so long ago, with his siblings. Fleeting as happiness has always been for him, he can, at the very least, remember being happy before. He’s been content too, though he never did allow that for long. Contentment always felt too much like giving up.

But he has a right to contentment now. For all intents and purposes, he should be content. He should see that this timeline has ended and feel happiness, pride. Good emotions. Hell, he’d take any emotions at all rather than the aching emptiness he feels, or the roiling shame. He can’t stop thinking about Dallas, though he hadn’t been thinking about it at all until that dream. It was just a dream. Dreams don’t mean anything, they’re just sleep-induced hallucinations.

In the dream, he kissed first. It didn’t go like that in reality, or at least that’s not what he remembers. Maybe he did kiss first, a balding fiftysomething assassin’s nonsensical honeypot ploy. It’s hard to remember what the point was, what it was that he wanted.

_Did you want her?_

“No,” he says with undisguised disgust, because the one thing he can remember clearly is not wanting her, just going along because once it started he couldn’t stop.

Once it started, she wouldn’t stop, and he’s the one that got her started. He has a right to understand his own actions; if he has so much power, then he ought to have power over his own memories.

Maybe he did want her, and now he just doesn’t remember. Maybe he’s even being unfair to her. Maybe it was his lizard brain betraying him. His body betrayed him every time, excruciatingly sensitive to touch. Maybe he wanted her so much that his mind made up a hotel room and a dining room and the faint outline of buildings in the dark and every single thing about her that he recognized in Dallas.

_Did you want her?_

“I don’t know,” he says, and that comes out plaintive. He feels dizzy enough that he remembers that he should eat and drink something. He’s almost sure that someone came upstairs a while ago and told him that they were having dinner. Since, as far as he can tell, he never went to dinner, he must’ve waved them away, or maybe Allison and Luther warned them off of talking to him, or maybe it hasn’t been that long. Five hates maybes.

(Here’s what he wanted:

To know what she knew.

Here’s what he wanted:

To have what she had—power over him.

Here’s what he wanted:

Everything she took from him, and everything she refused to give back.)

The light in his room has dimmed. He looks out the window, and it’s night-time. His room is lit entirely by the moon. His eyes adjusted with ease.

He hopes that it’s late enough that no one’s awake, or at least that no one’s around, and he blinks down to the kitchen. He nearly topples over from the wave of light-headedness that follows. He’s not hungry as such, but he needs something in his stomach, and he digs through the cupboards for anything edible. He finds cereal, bread, peanut butter, and an abundance of Tupperware. No marshmallows, which renders the peanut butter useless.

Five will eat almost anything, but not peanut butter alone. He doesn’t like how it sticks to the roof of his mouth, and he still gets a thrill from refusing food just because he doesn’t like it.

He takes out the cereal and pours some into his hand, shoving it into his mouth and chewing as he opens the fridge and finds bread and cheese and even more Tupperware, much of it labeled with mom’s inhumanly neat handwriting. He pauses when he sees one labeled “Five” in Diego’s handwriting, his blocky letters overlapping with mom’s label of “pizza.” Then there’s spaghetti and meatballs, roasted chicken, and chicken stir-fry, all labeled for him. They’re even dated _._

They saved him food, and Five feels a rush of something approaching shame.

He grabs the container labeled for both him and pizza and finds three pieces. He eats them while standing in front of the open refrigerator, holding the container to his chest, and when he’s done, unsure of what to do with the Tupperware, he just turns around and throws it in the sink. He feels better. Slightly more energized. Also nauseous, but that’s just how food is.

He’s exhausted enough that in most other circumstances he would actually consider sleep, but the dream he had and the consequences of it make him falter. He considers just drinking until he can sleep, and then strikes that idea. Alcohol may usually bring him dreamless sleep, but he can think of several times when that hasn’t worked.

It’s not foolproof, and he can admit, if only to himself, that he feels like enough of a fool to be reluctant to try it right now. He’s tired, but he’s even more tired of seeing her, a kind of exhaustion that sleep will never fix. Coffee might, so he makes some and drinks the entire pot in short order. The coffee maker’s nothing special, so the coffee’s not very hot, and he’s thankful that he doesn’t have to wait for it to cool down. It’s instant, and tastes terrible, and Five really doesn’t care. He doesn’t register taste anymore, just texture sometimes; necessary if he’s going to avoid food that’s too rotten for even him.

He thinks that the last time he savored food was in that dining room, and now he tastes blood in his mouth. He makes himself another pot of coffee, and decides to walk it up to his room instead of teleporting, so as to conserve his energy—he doesn’t want to pass out, that’s too close to sleeping—and because there’s no one around. He finds a 16 ounce measuring cup that looks big enough to take the whole pot, and pours the coffee in.

He turns from the coffee maker, ready to go, and sighs. Klaus is standing there, leaning on the doorframe with his arms crossed, giving Five an inquisitive look. Five considers blinking upstairs after all, but even if he doesn’t pass out, he may very well drop the coffee, and he’ll put up with Klaus to avoid that. “Move,” he says.

“What the hell is going on with you?” Klaus asks in response, and Five scoffs and shakes his head, already rejecting the very thought of answering the question. “Oh, come on. Everyone can tell a wire or ten got crossed in that scary little brain of yours.”

“If you say you’re worried, I’ll kill you,” Five says, voice flat.

“Then I won’t say I’m worried, or that we’re all worried, or that your timeline project that you _apparently_ lost like two entire days to isn’t creepy.”

Five feels himself tense. Did Diego tell them that? Asshole.

“What’s it even about, Five? I mean, you, probably, but from what I’ve seen and heard, which is a lot, because we’re talking about you behind your back, it’s a little short to encapsulate forty-five whole years.”

Five feels embarrassment prick at his skin. He was hoping his siblings hadn’t noticed quite as much as Klaus is implying they have, or that they hadn’t actually been discussing it. Discussing him. “None of your business,” he mutters.

“Sure,” Klaus says, shrugging. “I’m still curious. You sure your little project isn’t some way to replace that whole apocalypse _addiction?_ Your little project that’s, no offense, probably just a totally pointless attempt to give your life meaning again even though it’s obviously driving you _mental_ and you’re…what, three seconds away from hitting rock bottom?”

The words throw a wrench into the gears turning in Five’s brain, and he feels like he’s been shot, or like someone let a gun go off right next to his head and now his ears are ringing. Scrabbling to do something in response, Five widens his eyes until they feel dry and lifts his lips into the barest hint of a sneer. It’s the kind of look that’s made a lot of people back off before, but Klaus just grins. Five wants to break something.

_You have no idea what you’re talking about. Stop fucking laughing, I’m serious._

Klaus’s voice is smug when he says, “I’ve been to rehab sooo many times, buddy, you don’t know how many of these truth bombs I’ve got locked and loaded.”

“No wonder it’s all bullshit, since rehab never worked for you,” Five snaps, the word “rehab” serving only to tense his body even more. Klaus has done this before, talked about all that reasonable-sounding nonsense he learned in endless court-ordered therapy appointments like it means anything. There’s always a note of mockery in his voice, and Five doesn’t appreciate being fucked with. “And you’re mixing metaphors.”

“Oooh, you’re angry at yourself, so you’re lashing out at me. That’s called displacement,” Klaus says smugly, and Five’s off balance. He doesn’t know what Klaus wants. To make fun of him? To bait him? To get eviscerated?

So Five just keeps staring Klaus down, trying to both intimidate Klaus and figure out how to get out of this situation, because his head is starting to pound and he’s nauseous and Klaus isn’t right, but what makes Five’s brain spark and screech is that Klaus isn’t _wrong._ It’s hard to think past that, and now his mind can’t seem to process much of anything but vague whirls of dreams and memories, fantasy and reality, her smile in his mind’s eye. He just stood there, all he could do was stand there and look at her. He couldn’t move. He didn’t know what would happen if he did.

Sometimes ashes fell from the ceiling of the hotel and landed in her hair and he doesn’t know if the ashes will ever go away and he didn’t know then either, he really didn’t know, she confused him, she cracked his skull open and scooped out all the parts of him left that he liked.

Here’s something relevant: she could’ve sent him back to the apocalypse, and he would’ve done anything to avoid going back, especially at first when he really thought that he was as disposable to her as everyone else, and maybe he was back then. When she got him.

From the doorway, Klaus’s demeanor changes, his posture tensing, his brow furrowing. He moves forward a few steps. “Five? Heyyy, I’m…hey, it’s fine, we really are just…ugh, gimme a word that means worried but isn’t worried…we’re anxious…concerned… _perturbed_ on your behalf. Especially right now, because I’m starting to get the feeling that you’re freaking out and that’s my bad and you really look like shit.” He’s rambling and Five just wants everything to shut up, he wants the world to shut up and then finally cohere, and in the absence of anything that makes genuine sense, Five decides to miss the point.

“I look like shit?” Five spits out. “You’re one to talk. Your make-up is running, your nail polish is chipped, and Allison’s nightgown isn’t flattering on you at all.”

Klaus pouts, exaggerated. _Fake, fake, fake._ “Mean.”

“Mean enough that you’ll leave me the fuck alone?”

“Ehhhh,” Klaus says, making a face that means _not really._ Unbothered, unsurprised. The genuine part of him is gone, and Five wants it back. He feels a surge of anger of the sort that usually ends in violence, but he’s so _fucking_ well-adjusted that he doesn’t go that route.

He speaks instead.

He snarls, “Fine. If you want to play, I’ll play. You want to tell me I’m fucked up? You’re probably wandering around because you had a nightmare about your time in Vietnam, which was too bad but not exactly high drama. Get the fuck over it. Then again, maybe you’re just jonesing. Either way, you _really_ want a hit, but Ben and the distant possibility of seeing that guy you fell in love with while on your little vacation are stopping you. By the way, hi, Ben, sorry you’re dead and no one but a selfish, useless, junkie _idiot_ who’ll go on and on about shit he doesn’t actually care about for kicks can see you.” Klaus reels back, and Five feels some vicious satisfaction. _I win, I win, I win._

Klaus’s mouth is open and his eyes are shining, and the look on his face is a mess of emotions, surprise and betrayal and even disgust. Klaus has never been that hard to hurt, especially without drugs to help him bounce back, and this is too raw for him. He doesn’t have a comeback for this, and he’s going to storm out of the room, and hopefully Ben will be able to stop him from getting fucked up, but it’s not Five’s problem.

Five doesn’t fucking know what his problem is, maybe it’s having too many problems at the same time and they’re all crushing him, and if he could move he thinks he’d like to push past Klaus, go back to his room, open the window and _jump._

He still can’t bring himself to move, so he just give Klaus his most unpleasant smile and spits out, “Mean enough for you?”

And then Klaus whispers, “No.”

His voice is delicate, wavering, and Five, standing in the kitchen like an asshole with the handle of a measuring cup of ten ounces of cooling coffee clutched in his hand, is silent.

(It’s been so long, and his siblings have changed and are changing, Klaus is changing, but Five didn’t consider that maybe Klaus is stronger than he used to be.)

“It doesn’t stop being displacement,” Klaus says, voice still pitchy and shaking, “just ‘cause you’re _really_ cruel about it.”

And just like that, Five isn’t silent anymore. He lets out a strangled, animal sound, and he can move again. The measuring cup falls to the floor, plexiglass bouncing off of the hardwood and coffee spraying in all directions. He doesn’t give a damn, not anymore. It’s the last thing on his mind.

“Stop it!” he yells, and he’s not controlling his voice like he did with her, he never yelled at her, he should’ve yelled at her. “Stop! You think everything you’re saying is bullshit, you’re not being serious with me! You’re just _telling_ me things like I’m stupid, like I’ll believe you even though I know you’re fucking around!”

Klaus gives Five a look that’s confused and exasperated and still hurt and more than a little pissed off, even outraged. He lists slightly to the left, holds his arms out, and shrugs at the same time. “No, I’m not.”

“You always talk about the self-help _shit_ you learned in rehab like it’s some kind of joke,” Five accuses. “And now you’re regurgitating it and telling me you’re serious?”

“Okay, yeah, I see where you’re coming from,” Klaus says, leaning forward a little and putting his hands together. It makes him look like a praying mantis. “But I’m not joking. I mean, okay, I like, mentioned rehab and said displacement and all to keep it light-hearted, but that’s because I’m like that, okay? I’m incapable of being all…stern and concerned and whatever for more than ten seconds without starting to joke, it’s a character flaw! But it doesn’t mean I’m not serious, or that I’m not right.”

“You’re _not_ right,” Five says.

“Eh, I feel like I’m right about _something._ I mean, I wasn’t joking when I said, y’know, way back when—what was it, two months ago?—that you were totally treating the apocalypse like some kind of drug, and it’s a _thing_ to replace one addiction with another, which means you feel like you need some kind of project to just…get through life.”

_Not wrong, not wrong, not wrong._ The thought claws at Five’s mind, and the confusion only burns brighter in his brain. Nothing’s actually any better if Klaus isn’t joking.

_Why would you take anything he says into account? He’s an idiot, the only advice he can give is the kind he won’t take._

“Five,” Klaus says, too soft and too nice, and Five wants to remind him that he’s still covered in all the acid Five just spat at him, but he doesn’t have the time because Klaus just keeps talking. “Look, if no one else is gonna say it, I will, ‘cause I’m that kind of person. You are having some kind of nervous breakdown.”

“Don’t tell me what’s happening to me,” Five snaps.

“Okay, then you tell me.”

“I’m moving on,” Five says, the words tripping from his mouth like they were programmed into him.

“Uh, I think you’re kinda doing the exact opposite of that.”

“I’m not,” Five says in response, but the words feel useless. _Fake, fake, fake._ Klaus doesn’t even know what he’s supposed to be moving on from. Five isn’t so sure either, and the uncertainty makes him lose his patience. He snaps, “I don’t have to tell you anything.”

“No, you don’t. You don’t have to do anything you don’t wanna do,” Klaus agrees as if it’s the easiest thing in the world. “I just think it might help, okay? And that’s not me regurgitating things. We’re just confused, and scared, and I want to make sense of this, I wanna get it, we all do.”

Another surge of rage, and this time Five can’t keep it contained to words, this time his body jerks forward, first an aborted lunge at Klaus, who takes a step back. It’s unnecessary. Five doesn’t attack; his broken body just takes over, heaves and twists, stomps and spits, tears at all the empty space that’s suffocating him. “I want to make sense of this too!” And he’s not yelling anymore, he’s screaming, voice ragged and breaking. “That’s all I want! That’s all I’m trying to do! I just want to make sense of it, but I still don’t have anything to tell you! I don’t know what to say, or how to say it! There’s nothing to say!”

“Hey!” Klaus yells when Five stops to try and catch his breath, and there’s thumping and creaking in Five’s brain, muttering and flashes of color, but Klaus is loud and talks over it all, his movements big enough that he’s all that Five sees. “Five! You obviously have something to say, so just—say it, maybe we can help, maybe we have some insight, I don’t know! What are you trying to make sense of? Just say _anything_ about what’s going on! Say it out loud—fuck, just say it to yourself!”

“I don’t want to!” Five screams, and his voice cracks and then fails as the words pierce the smoke-choked atmosphere, and Klaus’s eyeliner is running and he looks like he wants to be anywhere but here. And yet, he isn’t.

Just like Five, he’s in too deep and he doesn’t want to give up now.

“Why not?” Klaus asks.

“I can’t,” Five says. His voice is hoarse. He’s sweating and shaking and swallowing down bile, and Klaus looks like he’s wavering. Five gets the feeling that if he tells him to leave, Klaus will.

For the first time, he doesn’t want him to, because Five isn’t sure what he’ll do if Klaus goes.

So he keeps talking, because _he’s not wrong, he’s not wrong, he’s not wrong_. “I don’t have all the facts. I don’t know if I’ll ever have all the facts, and I want them, but even then, I’m not looking as deeply as I could. There’s something I think I could look up, but if I don’t find anything I don’t know what’ll happen to me, and if I do…” Five shrugs helplessly. “Fine, maybe I did just want a project, and then it became something else, but I’m not sure. If you really want the truth, the truth is that there’s a lot I’m not sure about. I was trying to put the pieces together with the timeline. That’s all. Not even my whole life, just…what happened while I was at the Commission. What happened with her.”

Five swallows and finally dares to look around the kitchen, because he’s been seeing things out of the corner of his eye. They’ve been appearing since he started really losing it. All of his siblings except for Klaus and Ben.

They are silent and shell-shocked and he barely pays them any mind. He knows that if he tries to study them, they’ll just fall apart, and it’s pointless to try. He skims his eyes over them to make sure that he’s not imagining that he’s imagining things.

He used to see them sometimes, as they were in death, or, in the case of Vanya, as she was on her book jacket. Ben was thirteen forever, but he’s not here now, which is strange, because when more than one of his siblings appeared, it was usually just all of them. Then again, they’re not real. Their presence is strange by definition.

They’ll go away soon, they always did before.

He closes his eyes, shakes his head, and looks back at Klaus. Klaus has been here since before the others appeared. He’s real, even though there isn’t a carbon copy of him lingering around either.

He wonders if Klaus is ignoring his own ghosts right now, but from what he can see, Klaus is giving him his full attention, nodding like a bobblehead even though he must be completely lost. To reward his uncharacteristic patience, Five tells him, “I think I know.”

He says it like a secret, his voice coming out high and even childish in a way he can’t bring himself to care about, because he’s not quite here anymore. He’s in the ruins of a library and in the hotel room and in the middle of the kitchen and it doesn’t matter what his voice sounds like. “I was studying it, and then I was thinking about it, and dreaming about it, about what really happened, the truth behind the project.” Five inhales deeply, and on the exhale, he says, “There are some points on the timeline that may not be real. With her. What she did, it may just be fantasy, and I’ve been trying to figure out what happened and what didn’t. And I.”

_I know that none of it was a fantasy._

Five stops short, because he doesn’t have all the facts, and how is he supposed to know if there are still so many questions that he can’t answer? If he can’t prove what happened?

_There are a lot of things that can’t be proven, idiot. It doesn’t mean that they’re wrong._

Here’s what he knows: what he experienced, what he saw, all the evidence that he gathered over the course of those years, and no, none of that will prove what happened. But when all of that evidence is put together and studied, when he thinks about it critically, it serves only to disprove the Handler’s statements that Five made it up.

The possibility that she wasn’t just outright lying to him—it’s vanishingly small. Negligible. Five doesn’t know what X equals, but in any other situation he’d say that that doesn’t matter. There’s enough evidence. It’s her word against his, and she was lying. In any other situation, the knowledge that he’d already amassed would be enough to reach an acceptable conclusion.

Why is this different?

Five feels a wave of nauseous dizziness as his body decides to remind him that it’s exhausted and his legs give out. His knees thump against the floor. His thoughts scatter, all of his questions diffusing into confusion and the answers disappearing. Klaus swears and moves to crouch in front of him, and there are sounds of alarm all around. Five puts his hands to his head. This is too much. He doesn’t know where all of these voices are coming from.

Someone kneels down next to him, and Five tenses. That’s not Klaus. “Guys, maybe give him some space,” Vanya says, and she puts a light hand on his shoulder.

Five flinches away violently, swinging his head to stare over at Vanya and then up at his other siblings, who are all, in fact, crowding him. The siblings that he saw in the apocalypse, they never touched him even once.

Maybe he should’ve taken a closer look.

“You’re real,” he whispers. “I thought…” He looks over at Klaus. “Why didn’t you tell me they were here?”

Klaus’s jaw drops, but he manages to stutter out, “Uh, I thought…I thought you knew? You…looked at them, Five.”

“I thought they were…during the apocalypse I…oh. That’s why I didn’t see you or Ben.”

“I’m sorry, you’ve been hallucinating us?”

“It’s been years since it last happened,” Five says. “I thought it was strange.”

“Not strange enough to mention?!”

“Usually I just ignored them and they went away,” Five explains, and then the blind panic that’s been eating at him this whole time bursts like an aneurysm.

He can’t breathe. His heart is beating inside his throat and brain and knees, anywhere but his chest, which is burning, constricting, writhing, and he looks down at the floor and feels his breaths scrape their way halfway down his throat, expelled before they can get into his lungs.

Here he is, talking about reality, and he didn’t even recognize his own brothers and sisters.

If he’d looked closer, he would’ve figured it out. If he’d studied them, he would’ve seen that they were real, he was just assuming that they weren’t from the beginning, which was, in retrospect, an insane assumption to jump to. He should’ve looked closer, he would’ve figured out that they were real, like in the hotel room, like with the Handler, that’s how he figured out…

No. No, he didn’t figure out anything. He didn’t figure out anything, nothing happened at all, he doesn’t know, there’s no way he’s made sense of it, he’s only just started, he has to go back to the timeline, he has to find out what X equals, he has to…

Klaus has moved back some, and now Diego is crouched in front of him. Just a parade of his siblings watching him humiliate himself, he guesses, that’s fantastic, that’s exactly what he wanted out of this evening. Vanya isn’t touching him, but she’s still sitting next to him, and can feel her warmth. He doesn’t move away. He hopes she won’t move away either.

“Five,” Diego says, voice loud and clear. “Five, can you hear me?”

“Unfortunately,” he wheezes, and Vanya lets out a high-pitched laugh.

“Yeah, okay, there he is. Five, can you take a deep breath?”

Five shakes his head without thinking through the motion; he’s lost control of his body, he’s always losing control of his body.

“Seriously? You can live in the apocalypse for forty years but you can’t take a deep breath for me?”

Five lifts his head to glare at Diego, who raises his eyebrows expectantly. “Come on, Five, deep breath. I’m breathing, Vanya’s breathing, everyone here’s doing a great job breathing, except Ben, but he doesn't have to. And anything we can do you can do better, right?”

Well. Not wrong. Five tries to catch one of his quick, harsh inhalations and stretch it out, get it down his windpipe at least, and he almost manages it, but then his breath skips and wheezes and picks up again.

“Hey, no, you were close. Keep trying. Breathe like me.” Diego takes a deep, exaggerated breath, and then another. “See?”

Five nods, and Diego takes another deep breath. Five copies him once, and then again. He still doesn’t feel like he’s getting oxygen into his lungs, but he’s not quite hyperventilating anymore. “Okay,” Diego says. “Good. Take another deep breath, and then hold it for three beats. Can you do that?”

It’s the last thing Five wants to do, but of course he can _do that_ , and he proves it by sucking in a deep breath—or something approaching one—and holding it.

“One, two, three, breathe out.”

Five does.

“Now do it again. No, do it again. Breathe in. Hold. One, two, three. Breathe out, slow, nice and easy. Okay, now breathe in. Breathe in. Hold! One, two, three…”

Breathe out. Breathe in. Breathe out. Breathe in. Breathe out.

Five’s chest starts to open, and he slumps over as he catches his breath.

“Hey, you did good, man,” Diego says as if Five cares what he thinks. “Come on, let’s get you up, okay?”

Five nods and, through sheer force of will, gets to his feet. He sways dangerously, and Diego puts a hand on his arm. Five pulls away so hard that he nearly falls, and Vanya puts both of her hands on his shoulder to keep him standing, which makes Five jerk away again, the small of his back slamming against the table.

Vanya says, in the kind of voice one might use to talk to an underfed, feral kitten, “Hey, it’s okay, it’s okay. We just need to get you to your room, you need some rest.”

Five gives her a shaky nod, and as he drifts out of the room, the possibility of teleporting so distant as to be ridiculous, he hears a snatch of conversation from the kitchen and pauses. Diego and Vanya, who have been flanking him, both freeze, and Vanya nearly trips. They think he’s going to fall, but he’s just listening, because he knows that whatever they’re saying in there, it’s about him.

“Klaus,” Luther starts, and then he clears his throat awkwardly before soldiering on. “He, uh…he kept talking about _her._ Who is she?”

 Klaus says, “I have no fucking idea.”

Five is keenly aware of his general shakiness, and he’s starting to think that whether he uses his powers or not, he’s going to pass out. Panic sparks in his mind again. Even if he doesn’t pass out, he’s going to end up sleeping, and he can’t sleep, it brings up so many questions that are too hard to answer and he doesn’t want to see her or the ashes…

Five takes a deep breath, holds it for three beats, and then breathes out and moves forward with purpose, as though he doesn’t feel like he’s going to keel over. He needs this moment to end. He’s fine, and now he looks like he’s fine, so he’s fine. He takes the stairs two at a time even though both Diego and Vanya protest, and when he reaches his room it’s only luck that allows him to collapse on the bed instead of somewhere in front of his wardrobe.

He stares at the ceiling.

_Lie back and think of—_

Damn it, can’t he dwell on something other than this nonsense?

His timeline, maybe, the parts that really happened, though technically he supposes that he can’t prove anything, his entire life just the kind of theory people take for granted, like natural selection or some of the more intricate workings of general relativity. Hell, maybe somewhere out there, there’s a convincing argument—backed by an abundance of evidence—that he’s actually not here, that his entire life is a fantasy, that he’s still in the apocalypse or maybe never existed at all.

He’s not sure if the timeline is accurate, he has to re-check it.

His head lolls to the side and he catches sight of Diego and Vanya in his room, hovering. When he blinks, they’re still there, and he takes a closer look. There are so many little details that he never would’ve imagined—the scratch on Diego’s cheek, the cold sweat on Vanya’s brow, the concern in their eyes. The versions of them that he saw in the apocalypse had nothing in their eyes.

Five regrets telling them that he thought they weren’t real. That is not going to go over well.

(The Handler was never imperfect as such, always impeccably presentable, but there were differences every time he saw her, different clothes—he hasn’t placed enough consideration on the different clothes, thinking about the exact, separate situations just gets complicated and he prefers to study what the marker on the wall says—and once there was something on her teeth that he thought was blood but was actually lipstick and she complained of cold sores and he couldn’t relate until she started visiting and he suddenly could…)

“I think I forgot to close the door to the refrigerator,” he says.

“It’s okay,” Vanya replies. “I’m sure someone else remembered.”

Five nods ineffectually against the covers, and then curls onto his side on his bed, his back turned to Vanya and Diego even though he usually keeps it against the wall. He makes his breathing sound even.

“I think he’s out,” Diego mutters, and Five almost smiles to himself.

“Yeah,” Vanya says. “Should we…leave? Do you think?”

“Guess so. What’s he gonna do? Kill someone in his sleep? He’s a big boy, he just needs some rest. We’ll talk to him when he wakes up.”

There’s a moment of quiet, and then Vanya snorts as though she just remembered something funny. “I can’t believe you tried to heckle him out of a panic attack.”

“Hey, it worked.”

The conversation is very civil, Five thinks idly. Considering how Vanya and Diego usually get along, they should thank Five for this bonding moment.

Then it’s quiet except for the sound of the door closing, and Five is alone again. 

+

Five drifts in and out of consciousness. The dreams that come to him are blessedly pedestrian, rubble and patchy words and radio waves and blue, blue, blue, only the barest vision of the hotel room chasing him when he actually wakes up. He wakes with a jolt, but he does feel like he slept. He doesn’t feel well-rested as such, but that’s too much to ask.

The memory of the regrettable encounter he had with his siblings hits him and his stomach drops as he pushes his hands into his eyes, biting back a groan. Fuck. They’re going to want to talk about that. He hates living with other people, especially ones who don’t know when to leave well enough alone, like Klaus. If Klaus hadn’t pushed, none of that would’ve happened.

Five pulls his hands from his eyes and then frowns, unsettled. It’s still dark, and the clock on his dresser reads 0400 hours, but it was dark when he went to sleep. It’s been a few hours at least; it should be fully light by now.

Faintly he remembers waking briefly, swiping at someone when they touched him, Luther’s face coming into focus, the words, “Woah, I was just wondering if you were awake enough to eat something, but…I guess not. Go back to sleep, it’s fine…”

Maybe he’s been asleep longer than he thought. A whole day? More? He wonders if that’s better than losing time when he’s awake, and he pulls at the collar of his shirt as he becomes more disoriented. He considers calling out for someone, if there is someone anywhere, if this isn’t a dream. He sits up, the bed creaking under him, and his heart leaps when he hears someone else’s breathing.

_It’s just you, idiot,_ he tells himself, but he feels an itch all over his body. There’s someone watching him. He scrambles to his knees, and looks.

His mind goes blank. He’s not itching anymore. He’s just numb. The person he was not so long ago, the person who yelled and screamed, is gone. She could always make him feel like that. Like he was gone.

The dim light doesn’t allow him to see her in detail, but he sees enough. She’s standing in front of his wardrobe, and she looks just like she does in the photo Hazel sent him, the one he’s studied so closely. Same outfit, same bullet hole in her face, same everything except she’s very, very alive, and she’s here for him. Five’s vision swims. He feels absolutely nothing.

He only knows.

He knows that she’s under the same roof as his family, and he’ll die before he allows her to so much as smile at his brothers or sisters.

He let her touch him.

He will _never_ let her touch them.

With the Handler’s help, Five became a killer, and just because it’s been a little while doesn’t mean he’s rusty, and just because it’s her doesn’t mean he’s going to freeze. Not anymore. Every good assassin sleeps with a gun nearby, and Five is a good assassin. He opens his bedside drawer and takes out his handgun and some bullets. The magazine holds fifteen, he grabbed five. It doesn’t matter. He can kill with just one.

The pistol he used in the field was an M17, but this one is a Glock 19. It’s what he could find blinking into the nearest gun shop after hours, and it’s not like he gives a damn. This’ll do the job.

Five ejects the magazine, pushes the bullets in, and re-inserts it into the pistol without a second thought. A killing machine racks the slide and pulls the trigger. Three shots go off in rapid succession. Semi-automatic, just like Five.

The bullets hit the Handler in center mass, but they don’t pierce her skin, and she doesn’t fall to the floor. She doesn’t make a sound. Five blinks, and she’s gone. Her disappearance isn’t indicated by a flash of blue.

That would imply she’d ever actually been there.

Five closes his eyes tightly, opens them, and she’s…still not there. He lets his trigger finger slip to the trigger guard.

There’s a tight cluster of three bullets embedded in his wardrobe, and the Handler was never there.

“Shit,” he whispers to himself, wincing when he hears a commotion nearby. There’s a lot of yelling.

As much as Reginald Hargreeves tried to shut them up, his children were never quiet people.

“Were those gunshots or was it just me?”

“It wasn’t just you. What the fuck happened?”

“Oh, shit, Five! What did he _do?”_

Fuck, they’re going to want to talk about this too.

(This was not what Five signed up for when he decided to save his family, the earnestness and attachment and awkward family meetings.)

He’s still pointing the gun at the place where the Handler was when his door gets slammed open, nearly torn off its hinges. His bedroom’s taking a lot of damage today.

He takes a quick look at his siblings. They all seem to be in pajamas, but they’re wide awake, rattled and horrified. The floor rumbles under Five and his lamp falls off of his table. Vanya. He grimaces. If he causes the end of the world by scaring the hell out of her, he’ll…well, he’ll be dead this time, at least, but he’ll still be stupid, and also have failed miserably in training her.

Allison puts an arm around Vanya’s shoulders, and the rumbling subsides before it can become a real earthquake. Five turns his attention back to the wardrobe. The wood is splintered. One of the bullets almost went through the door, but only almost. No wonder it’s so heavy, it’s made of strong stuff.

Firing the gun was second nature. He didn’t even have to think about it, and it’s not like he had any reason to fumble or hesitate before shooting.

Five turns the safety on, because it would be embarrassing to shoot at nothing. He’s still pointing the muzzle at the place where she was, either dawdling or waiting for her to come back or frozen yet again.

“Five,” Luther says in his best Number One voice. “Put down the gun.”

She’s not coming back.

Five feels both grounded and like everything heavy in him has floated away, like nothing matters but his target. It’s not an unfamiliar feeling. In the apocalypse and at the Commission, he just had no place left in him for emotions. He puts his arms up, keeping one hand around the grip of the pistol, pointing the muzzle down and away from the wardrobe and himself and his siblings. Diego darts forward and takes it.

“Careful,” Five says, voice coming out in an even monotone. “It’s still loaded.”

“I thought I got rid of all of Dad’s guns,” Luther says. “How did you get a gun?”

Five doesn’t answer. He adjusts his body so that he’s sitting on his bed, feet hanging over the edge, facing his siblings. His room is too small for all of them. They’re crowding him and there’s no way out the door. No exit. There’s a clear line to the window, though, but when he looks over to make sure, he sees something out of place and feels a sting of confusion, and then of annoyance. He turns back to his siblings. “Who put a childproof lock on my window?”

Allison jerks her thumb over at Diego, who rolls his eyes. “You bought them,” he mutters at her, and then he shrugs. “Yeah, sorry,” he says, not at all sorry. “I locked the window when you disappeared to Allison’s shower.”

Five scoffs. “And you thought that that would stop me?”

“Not like you even noticed until now.”

Five feels a vague spark of unease at that. It’s true, he didn’t notice, and it’s not like it was hard to miss. The lock is an eyesore. He doesn’t dwell on it. He turns his attention to Allison and narrows his eyes at her. He injects some acid into his voice when he asks, “Are you trying to trap me?”

Allison shakes her head, scrawls some words into her notebook, and then shows him: _DIDN’T WANT YOU TO JUMP._

The words swim in front of Five’s eyes, and he notes with mild dread that there’s smoke encroaching on his mind, fogging up the clarity he had a few moments ago. He misses the killing machine. It didn’t have to deal with things like this. It could always forget that it was confused. Struggling to keep from falling into the smoke, struggling to push away the thought that he wants to, he says, “That’s ridiculous. I wouldn’t do that.”

Allison shrugs. She has a sad look in her eyes, and Five doesn’t know if she believes him. Maybe she feels like she can’t believe him, and that’s a blow.

_Everyone can tell a wire or ten got crossed in that scary little brain of yours._

_You totally spaced out._

_Wait, did you not sleep?_

_You’ve been acting weirder._

_This isn’t over._

_You’ve been hallucinating us?_

_Everyone can tell. Everyone can tell. Everyone can tell._

_What did he do?_

_It’s been like two days._

_You’re exaggerating._

Maybe they’re not exaggerating.

He blinks slowly. “The gunshots,” he says, letting his eyes roam over the faces of his other siblings before settling back on Allison. “There were three of them. If I’d shot myself, there’d only have been one.”

Allison grimaces, shakes her head. She’d rather he not talk like that, though he only wants to reassure her.

“I was protecting you,” he says. “That’s all. I didn’t want her to get to you.”

Allison nods, sympathy in her eyes, if not understanding. She moves towards him and holds out a hand, jerking her head in the direction of the door. His siblings part like the Red Sea.

He doesn’t take her hand, but he stands up. He blinks, and he’s downstairs at the dining room table, a cup of coffee in front of him. He doesn’t think he teleported. Lost time again, then. For a second, despair tears at him. His timeline. He needs to re-check it. If he can’t remember what happened two minutes ago, there’s no way he got everything right, and he has to get all the facts straight, but he keeps telling himself that and yet the idea of going back upstairs and looking at it makes him feel sick. March 16, 1899. He’s so close.

The timeline is just the surface, like skin, and he thinks that he could open it, get a look at its beating heart, but he doesn’t know what he’ll see. He wants to be done with it, but he’s afraid that he’ll never get the blood off if he cuts it open.

Someone knocks their fist hard against the table, and usually—lately—that would put Five on high alert, but he hardly even registers the sound. He’s done with high alert for now. Not by choice, but he doesn’t care. He lifts his head to stare at Allison, who’s sitting across from him. Her eyes are kind. She wants to understand.

Out of all of his siblings, Five thinks that Allison is the one that’s changed the most, but even now he recognizes her. Allison, bright as a star and fortified with steel.

She lifts her hand to her cheek, and Five mirrors her. His fingers come away wet, and he puts his fingers to his lips and tastes salt. Interesting.

Five hasn’t cried in a very long time. It’s unprofessional to cry at work, and that’s what his life has been up until now. The surviving, and then the killing, it’s just been work. All to reach his goal—to save his family and, as a consequence, the world.

Twin tears trail down his face. They burn now that he’s noticed their presence. When he meets Allison’s eyes he sees that her lashes are wet. He wonders why her makeup isn’t running, and then remembers that it’s the early morning, and he woke her up, and her eyeliner is probably waterproof anyway.

“I’m not well,” Five tells her. His voice is even, nothing to betray that he’s crying. He’s just stating a fact.

Allison reaches across the table, holding her hand out palm up. This time, Five takes it.

“I’m not well,” he murmurs, and Allison nods.

She says, in that hoarse, painful shadow of a whisper. “I know. But you’ll get better.”

“Liar,” he says with no heat.

She gives him half a smile and uses her free hand to write a messy note and slide it over to him.

It reads, _NOT ANYMORE._

+ 

Five stays on the living room couch.

He doesn't say it's because he doesn't want to go back to his room, to the timeline, to March 16, 1899, but he thinks his siblings at least catch on a little, because Luther brings him clothes and Klaus brings him the throw blanket embroidered with fish that’s been folded on the chest at the foot of his bed for seventeen years and Diego shoves food at him even though he doesn't eat it, and none of them mention his room. Not to him, at least.

The most pressing issue Five is facing: he doesn't know where to go from here. All he knows is that he doesn't want to go _back,_ and he's too tired to even dwell on the past. Or maybe he just doesn't have the energy to think of anything for more than five seconds. He wonders if this is what it's like to be Klaus.

Klaus is the one who sweeps into the living room with a thermometer clutched in his hand and tells Five to open up. Five gives him an unimpressed look. “Are you serious?”

Klaus gives him big, pleading eyes that don’t work on him because there’s no reason that they would, but Five rolls his eyes and humors him. The thermometer makes him nauseous, but beeps before he can lose his patience and just spit it out.

Disinterested, Five informs Klaus that the thermometer reads 96.8.

“Bullshit,” Klaus says, swiping the thermometer and then goggling at the number. “Seriously? You’re actually running low.”

“I’ve always run low,” Five says, because it’s true. “I’m cold-blooded, like a snake,” he adds, hissing at Klaus for good measure.

Klaus laughs, half-hearted, still staring at the thermometer as though the numbers will change. Five feels a curl of discomfort in his throat, and none of the things he can say in response to this will do any good, so he turns his face away and closes his eyes.

With no hint of victory in his voice, Klaus says, “Told you he wasn’t that kind of sick.”

Five bites his lip until it bleeds.

He doesn’t expect his siblings to have much insight into this situation. If he doesn’t, there’s no reason that they would. Of course, he could give them a slightly expanded version of the story, tell them who _she_ is, even, because they’re always arguing about whether to ask him about _her_ or not when they think he’s not listening. Five is always listening.

He doesn’t tell them, and they don’t ask. He thinks that they’re afraid of what they might find out.

"I think you should see someone," Vanya says, seated on the coffee table.

"Mom's going to be upset if she catches you doing that," Five tells her. Then he says, "I'm seeing you."

Vanya snorts. "You're so bad at playing dumb."

"Vanya, I'm a fifty-eight year old in a thirteen-year-old child's body. Not even taking literally everything else about my life into consideration, there's no psychologist or, for that matter, psychiatrist, who would ever believe me or be able to help me."

"And if I could find one?"

"I'd be very impressed.”

“But would you go?”

Five considers the possibility of telling an objective party about the apocalypse. He’s mature enough to admit that it doesn’t seem like a terrible idea. Therapy’s helped all of his other siblings. Then again, they’re practically children compared to him. They had time to get help, he didn’t. The Commission gave him some treatment that he doesn’t clearly remember to re-familiarize him with other humans and the living world, though he does think he has some memory of injections that made him feel loopy and of refusing pills and of the Handler reassuring him that he was right, those things were poison and he was the last person who needed them.

Five considers the possibility of telling an objective party about the hotel room. He says, “Not a chance.”

Vanya sighs. “That’s what I thought.”

Five’s brothers and sisters tiptoe around him, but none of them will leave him alone even though he thinks he's made it clear that he's not going to kill himself. Maybe they think he's going to hurt someone else.

"You should lock me up like Vanya," he tells Luther, who doesn't find it funny.

"You're just being an asshole to push us away," he tells Five, and Five bares his teeth in a smile.

"Is it working?"

"No,” Luther says in lieu of a witty retort. Luther was always the worst at witty retorts.

Five sighs and looks up at the ceiling again. He’s memorized the ceiling of the living room by now, well enough that he can tell when it’s morphed into a different ceiling, a plainer one, no rafters.

Five stared up at that ceiling a lot. Luther is squished into the armchair he dragged in along with all the other furniture meant to make the living room more “homey”.

“I could never see the stars in the apocalypse, or the moon,” he says, the words coming out pitched higher and dreamier than he expected, though he barely even expected to speak. “Too much smoke, and the moon was just gone. It caught me off-guard when I got back to the living world and I could see the sky again. It would stop me in my tracks sometimes.”

Five’s voice drifts. He’s not sure what he’s getting at.

“Okay,” Luther says in the way he says things when he wants someone to keep talking but doesn’t have a response.

Luther’s voice sparks a memory in Five’s foggy brain, and, feeling charitable, he tells Luther about it. “When we were kids you’d go to my room at night, and you’d beg me to blink you up to the roof to look at the sky.”

Luther huffs out a laugh. “I remember that. I could never believe you actually agreed.”

“Well, it was good practice. Dad was almost impressed when he found out that I’d learned how to teleport other people with me.”

“...So that’s what it was about?”

Five snorts. “It was never about Dad for me.” He doesn’t expand on the statement, but he does ask, “Do you still remember all the constellations?”

“Yeah,” Luther says in a quiet, sad voice. “I do.” He’s silent for a moment, and then he perks up a little and says, “Maybe we can all go to the park or something and look at the stars. Later, when you’re...” He trails off.

Five lets out a harsh laugh.

Couldn’t even finish the sentence. Five doesn’t blame him. Right now he’s living in a present that’s got the past haunting it like a poltergeist, a past that he’s been trying so hard to uncover but is now actively avoiding—he can’t deny that anymore, though answering why is impossible.

(He knows how close he is. He knows the truth. He doesn’t.

He doesn’t know enough, it’s a classic he-said-she-said and look, Judge, we have to face the facts. He’s crazy. He made it all up.)

Luther clears his throat and soldiers on, because Luther’s always soldiered on, for better or for worse. “No, seriously. We’ll all go to the park and we’ll look at the stars. Later, when you’re better.”

Five takes in a quick, unexpectedly shaky breath. His eyes burn, and he blinks rapidly.

_There’s no later, Luther,_ he wants to say. _There’s no nebulous future where we go, what, have a fucking picnic and look at the fucking stars? Don’t be ridiculous._

He responds, “Someday.”

+

It’s been days. He knows that at this point his siblings are getting impatient, making pointed comments about communication even as they all remind each other, in a kind of Round Robin of high-strung, baffled concern, that it hasn’t been long since his breakdown and he’s been through a lot and _it takes time._ There’s no clarification as to what “it” is, and Five doesn’t ask. He doesn’t even inform them of the fact that his hearing hasn’t gone the way of his mind, and just because they’re always whispering around him doesn’t mean he can’t hear what they’re saying.

_It takes time,_ but his siblings aren’t patient people. They’re not big talkers either, but they’re curious enough to approach him, or at least consistently try to approach him and then back out. He doesn’t mind. He doesn’t have anything to say to their questions anyway.

_Did you ever notice that you’ve never admitted what happened? Out loud or even in writing? The closest you came to admitting it was your timeline, or maybe when you told Klaus that there was a fantasy in there…_

“That’s enough,” he mutters at his own thoughts, and Vanya, who’s sitting in the armchair reading, looks up at him with concern. He gives her a withering glare, and she rolls her eyes and goes back to her book.

The tension in the room is oppressive. If anyone’s going to ask him directly about _her,_ it’ll be Vanya, and Five’s too scattered to hear it. He considers blinking over to a park, or the bathroom, or fucking Saturn, but he dismisses the idea. Even though he’s been sleeping on and off for days now and his sleep hasn’t been plagued by nightmares—at least not enough that his siblings waking him up won’t shake him out of them—he still feels too exhausted to do much of anything but pointedly not think about _it_. Warping time and space is beyond him right now.

Five needs to do something. He needs to do anything, if only to make sure that Vanya won’t try to speak to him, won’t try to pry out the words that he knows are inside of him, even though he doesn’t know what exactly they are, just that they’ll change everything, or maybe confirm that everything is still the same.

His eyes land on a book on the coffee table, a big, hard-backed one that’s really only there to look nice and leaf through when trying to avoid unfortunate conversations. Perfect for him.

_Forgotten History of New York City._ Five pauses at the title, something like suspicion flickering through the smoke he’s blowing into his brain, but he brushes away any strange feelings and opens the book, flipping through the pages with little interest until he stops cold. He feels cold, like he’s been pushed into an ice bath, and all he’s looking at are a few black and white photographs, spread out on the huge, glossy pages of the book along with some columns of text.

There’s a photograph of a hotel. Five doesn’t recognize it, but then there’s a photograph of a dining room, and that Five does recognize, he would—well, he would clearly recognize it anywhere, because a random book about New York City is _anywhere._ The photograph is faded and a little out of focus. (Or maybe that’s just Five’s perception of it, as everything is getting to be a little out of focus.) There aren’t even people at the tables.

It’s just an empty dining room, but he recognizes that chandelier, the frescoed ceilings, and when he places a trembling finger on the outline of a table, it’s like he was sitting there just yesterday.

The other photographs are of clippings from _The New York Times,_ the one that came out the day after what happened with the Handler, and that same hotel on fire, and then just—gone. There’s smoke everywhere. Smoke and ashes.

Pictures like that will always look familiar to him.

His eyes drift to the text on the page, and he reads.

**MARCH 17, 1899 — THE DAY THE WINDSOR HOTEL BURNED DOWN.**

_The Windsor Hotel opened in 1873, just as it was becoming en vogue for well-off New Yorkers to take up permanent residence in hotels. Indeed, a pamphlet printed in the 1890s informs us that the Windsor billed itself as “the most comfortable and homelike hotel in New York.” The Windsor served sumptuous meals in its beautiful dining room, and had a private bath in every suite, a luxury at the time. Some of the most important people in New York, and, indeed, the world, small world that it was, passed through the doors of the Windsor._

_It was, quite simply, a lovely place, and on the night of March 16, no soul in or around the hotel could have imagined the horror that would play out the next day._

_The next day—March 17, St. Patrick’s, a day of celebration. The east side of Fifth Avenue between 46th and 47th Streets, where the Windsor Hotel was located, was the center of Manhattan’s principal promenade, and so there were many people congregated on the sidewalk in front of the hotel to watch the St. Patrick’s Day parade pass by._

_…And many people to witness in horror as the Windsor Hotel went up in flames, because go up in flames it did. A waiter at the hotel, James Foy, said that he saw a man light a cigar or cigarette on the second floor parlor and then toss the match, still lit, out of the window, or attempt to. Caught by the wind, the match blew into one of the Windsor’s fine lace curtains, and so began a raging fire that stole some eighty-six lives._

_Firefighters were sent out immediately to assist, some still in dress uniforms from the St. Patrick’s Day parade, but the Windsor Hotel was destined to be destroyed the second that the fire began. In less than thirty minutes, it burned to the ground, only two stone columns left of the once-proud building._

_The human cost was staggering, though it would have been higher had firefighters not taken truly heroic risks to make equally heroic rescues. It is unclear exactly how many people died, but they numbered at least eighty-six. Several guests, caught by the flames and desperate for a way out, jumped to their deaths, including Helen Leland, the twenty year old daughter of the hotel proprietor, Warren F. Leland, who also lost his wife in the blaze. Warren F. Leland was unable to identify his daughter’s body. He was reported to be “shattered,” and succumbed to appendicitis in April of the year of his wife and daughter’s deaths._

_Workmen dug through the ruins of the hotel day and night to recover the dead, attempting to see and breathe through thick smoke and sweltering heat. The efforts were not entirely in vain, as many remains were found._

_Thirty-one victims of the fire were never identified. Their final resting place is in Kensico Cemetery in Valhalla, New York. In 2014, 115 years after the fire, a memorial was built in Kensico Cemetery to honor the unidentified men and women who perished._

_And in the place where the Windsor Hotel once stood? There are two high-rises, and not even a plaque to commemorate the horror and the heroism of that fateful St. Patrick’s Day._

_As if the Windsor Hotel never existed at all._

Five stares down at the book, at the glossy two page spread, at the photographs of the brownstone that he never saw with his own eyes, at the dining room, at the photos of the fire and the shell-shocked workers sifting through the ruins, at that last line.

_Never existed at all._

Of course. Of course that’s what she did. She took him to a mystery hotel that would burn down the very next day. She played with him by taking him to the dining room. He told himself he didn’t remember why she did it, but he does. She said it was for her birthday, and he thinks she just liked the risk, low as the risk was, that going to the dining room would lead him to discover his location.

Five feels like he’s been turned inside out, and his mind isn’t full of smoke anymore. It’s blank. Again. She thought he was blank, that she could paint him into whatever she wanted, but she never could. She never knew him.

He still doesn’t have all the facts. He never will, because even if she were here, she wouldn’t tell him. Even with this knowledge, he knows what she’d say. She’d say she had no idea what he was talking about, just like she did in Dallas.

But if he’d known about the Windsor, Dallas would’ve gone differently. Maybe it all would’ve gone differently if he hadn’t felt as though he was just floating in some liminal place between time and space. He’s not sure exactly how, but maybe.

Maybe. Adverb. Something that never happened, so it doesn’t matter.

_“I’m not in the mood. I wasn’t then, either.”_

_“Why, Number Five, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”_

_“What you did. At the hotel.”_

_“What hotel? This hotel?”_

_“The hotel. You took me there, I never caught the name.”_

_“Why would I take you to some random hotel, Five?”_

“You wouldn’t,” he whispers in response. “You’d take me to a place like the Windsor.”

“Five?” Vanya asks, voice tentative. “You’re shaking. Is…is something wrong?”

Five says, in a hollow voice, “Get me a pen.”

Vanya does, and Five appreciates that she doesn’t hesitate or seem to think that he’s going to attempt murder by ballpoint.

In the upper margins of the book, he writes: X = THE WINDSOR HOTEL, NYC.

Well, then. This is exactly what he wanted to know. This is the answer that he was looking for.

_March 16, 1899. On this day in history absolutely nothing important happened except the Handler brought you to a hotel destined to burn…congratulations, Five, it existed, you figured out what you’d already figured out over and over again, would you like a medal?_

“Five?” Vanya asks again, and she’s moved to sit next to him now. Not touching him, but she’s close enough to see the book and what he wrote. “X equals…” she says very softly, and then she takes in a quick, shaky breath of surprise. “X.”

“I understand now,” Five says, because this piece of the puzzle, this piece of arbitrary importance, has made him put away his doubts, and the sticking point is that he didn’t want to. _That’s what made it different._ “I didn’t want X to equal anything. Of the two options I had, there was one that made sense and one that didn’t, but I didn’t want to believe it, so I told myself that it didn’t make enough sense to count. I told myself that my project wasn’t about it at all. I told myself so many things that I knew were lies, but I lied to myself so well that I managed to convince myself that I wasn’t lying at all. That she wasn’t lying at all.”

Vanya takes a deep breath, and then she asks, “What happened at the Windsor Hotel?”

_What you did. At the hotel._

And if he tells? Will it fix anything? Five doesn’t think so. Now that he knows what he already knew, it just feels uglier, a layer of unreality peeled back to reveal the same shitty reality. He got so good at playing her games. He let her do things he didn’t want her to do. He didn’t push. He didn’t try to find out the truth. He even decided to believe her when all she was telling him was that he was crazy, and he _is_ crazy, and that hasn’t changed either. She was just able to use it. Use him.

He never wanted her. He knew it. There was no part of him that ever wanted her.

_I understand. I’m a fucking idiot, and I understand, and this is going to kill me, it already killed me, she killed everything I had left because she knew that she could._

“Hey,” Vanya says, quiet and firm. “Please. Please tell me what happened. Does it have to do with her?”

Five nods slowly, and he finally says it, because he’s tired of not saying it. “The Windsor Hotel is where I slept with my boss. Or where she slept with me. Over and over and over again.” He doesn’t mention Dallas.

Vanya freezes. She slumps a bit. For a moment, Five thinks she’s going to leave. Then she says, “Oh. So you…had an affair?”

Five snorts. It’s a leading question and they both know it. Vanya’s put two and two together. “I guess so,” he agrees instead of saying _actually, both sides need to want to have an affair._

“No,” Vanya says, and there’s heat in her voice. He looks over at her in vague surprise, notes the sparking anger in her eyes. “No, that was a stupid thing to say. I’m sorry. I know you didn’t have an affair. She hurt you, didn’t she?”

Five looks back down at the book. He doesn’t know what to say. _She never left a bruise. Not a bruise on me, just a big fucking scar. She wouldn’t even tell me the truth. She played with me because she knew that I was just broken enough to play along. I never wanted her, and I spent years thinking I did._

He nods. “The Handler is the one who plucked me out of the apocalypse and gave me work as an assassin. And then one day she took me to a room at the Windsor Hotel. I could see the date on a newspaper on the table, so I knew that, but I never knew the name of the hotel. And she slept with me. She did it again and again, and she told me she didn’t.”

“She lied about that?” _You believed her?_

“She was a good liar, and I…get confused, I can’t always tell what’s real and what isn’t, and she knew that I knew that. It wasn’t out of the question that I could just think myself into sleeping with her, especially back then. Of course, once it started happening constantly, I just thought myself into thinking I’d thought myself into it.” He smiles faintly. “And then I got here. And I thought…I wanted to know something. I just wanted things in order, but…I don’t know. I don’t know. I wanted a project, and I chose the wrong one.”

“Maybe you wanted to face it,” Vanya says. “Sometimes it’s better to face things instead of running away.”

“I can’t run anymore,” Five whispers. “I’m too old for it, Vanya.”

Vanya puts her hand on his shoulder, and he lets her. She’s reassuring. He knows her. “You don’t have to run anymore. We’re here.”

“She won’t leave me alone.”

“You live with a lot of extraordinary people, Five. We’ll protect you.”

Five laughs out of pure surprise, and shakes his head. “Sure,” he says, and then he looks back down at the book. He closes it with more care than necessary, and places it on the coffee table.

Vanya squeezes his shoulder, and Five knows that if he pulls away, she won’t try to touch him again, so he doesn’t pull away. “You’ll get through this,” she says. “I’m here for you, we all are. We’re not fucking around. I understand if you don’t want to tell the others what happened, but I. I think you should.”

Five shrugs in response, but he knows he will. He found out what X equals. He can tell the whole story, both what he wanted and didn’t want to know. There’s no reason to not explain. He likes explaining his work, he tells himself, even though he feels exhausted. He sighs. “I just want to move on.”

“You have time,” Vanya says, and she’s not wrong.

Five nods slowly, and then he turns to Vanya. She doesn’t turn away. Her brow is furrowed, there’s sympathy in her eyes, and Five never expected these people, his family, to come through like this, but they did. Maybe they care about him as much as he’s always cared about them. It’s a thought.

Vanya doesn’t say anything, as though she’s waiting for him.

He asks, “Will you help me paint over the timeline?”

He doesn’t know that he’s going to say that until he does, but he finds that he doesn’t regret it.

Vanya smiles, familiar and undeniably real. “Yeah, of course,” she says. “We all will.” 

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to within_a_dream for betaing!
> 
> Shoutout to intearsaboutrobots for helping me hash this out when it was but an idea.


End file.
